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Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, when Republicans tell you over and over, over a period of generations, that they have no interest in protecting people's healthcare, you should take them seriously.

For decades, since the days of Ronald Reagan, they have argued that Medicare is socialism, that Medicaid creates cycles of dependency, that the Affordable Care Act is making healthcare more expensive when, in fact, it is doing the opposite. So you should not be surprised that, given the opportunity to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits and prevent people's premiums from more than doubling starting next month, Republicans do not have the votes to prevent that.

Look, this is not complicated. If Congress doesn't act this month, millions of Americans will lose their healthcare next year because they simply will not be able to afford to pay hundreds of dollars more every month for the same healthcare, and tens of millions of people will be forced to cut back on groceries or afterschool activities for their kids just so they can keep seeing their doctors.

The only way--the only way--to prevent the suffering that is about to happen is to pass a clean extension of these credits. There is no other plan. There is a lot of conversation--even on the left but also on the right--about how to reform the healthcare system. Nobody seriously thinks that can be accomplished in the month of December.

If we want to have a bipartisan conversation about how to fix the American healthcare system, count me in. This thing is a mess, between managed care and all of the subsidies and all of the sort of rent- seeking and the idea that most--maybe not most of the money but a substantial portion of the money in the American healthcare system goes to people and institutions and processes that don't deliver healthcare. There is utilization management. There is billing. There are pharmaceutical benefits managers. There are all kinds of rent seekers-- people in the American economy, institutions in the American economy, and publicly traded companies in the American economy that take a cut out of your money that should be going to healthcare. That is a very important point.

If there were a bipartisan opportunity to fix that, count me in; count 47 of us in. But let's not kid ourselves: No one is getting that done by next week. So the question in front of us is a little more crisp and a little more uncomfortable than ``Does the American healthcare system work efficiently?'' Of course it doesn't. But these subsidies allow people to stay alive. These subsidies allow people to stay insured. These subsidies allow people to afford their healthcare so they can pay their rent or their mortgage or buy their groceries.

The question in front of us is not some big abstraction about public policy. We are not at some Axios event about what we should do about the American healthcare system. The vote in front of us next week is, do you want people to pay double and triple, or do you not want people to pay double and triple?

So let's stop messing around. Let's stop pretending there is some magical solution that will emerge over the weekend. We have got 47 votes. We have got 47 votes. I take some pride in being able to count. It is a weird business I am in that being able to count is such a unique skill, but I can tell you we have got 47 votes. So what does that mean? We need 13 votes over there. I can't even find 13 people who will verbalize that they would like to avoid this spike in premiums.

We have run out of time, and if Republicans want to solve this, there is a very straightforward path.

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